Book review: tales from Facebook: culture online in Trinidad

After a century in which we have assumed social networking and community to be in decline, Facebook has suddenly hugely expanded our social relationships, challenging the central assumptions of social science. It demonstrates one of the main tenets of anthropology – that individuals have always been social networking sites. This book examines in detail how Facebook transforms the lives of particular individuals, but it also presents a general theory of Facebook as culture and considers the likely consequences of social networking in the future. Daniel Miller‘s book is a welcome and distinctive contribution to what is currently a small body of work on emerging online social networks, finds Chris Gilson. Tales from Facebook. Daniel Miller. Polity Books. July 2011.